Sunday, June 28, 2026
The AI Engineer World's Fair takes over Moscone this week, and it's worth the trip. So is a quieter room a few blocks away. At our last Building the State of the Art night, Cody demoed a per-room music system he built for The Commons with Claude Code, three headless browsers on a Mac Mini to get around Spotify API limitations. Everett added a live feature to his session tracker with Conductor, and Conner showed a meeting copilot that surfaces the context you'd otherwise lose. Watch BSOTA #5 on YouTube now.
See you at Builders Night tomorrow.
- Lee
P.S. I'm digging into how builders get unstuck, that moment you need a specific person who's already solved the thing in front of you. If that's you right now, reply and tell me what you're working on. I read every one, and I might be able to point you to someone.
Coming up at Rally
Builders Night
2026-06-29 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
A weekly coworking session built for the lonely part of building, where you show up with a project and leave with momentum from working alongside others. Quiet deep work sprints with a share-back to learn from what everyone's making.
Claude Code Demos: Building the State of the Art
2026-07-07 · 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are still figuring out workflows alone—BSOTA gets you in a room with others doing the same work. You'll see live walkthroughs of real setups and spend the rest of the night comparing notes and debugging approaches with people who actually use these tools daily.
Around SF this week
Monday, Jun 29, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
The Artificial Analysis team drops v4.1 of their Intelligence Index with NVIDIA and Google DeepMind, introducing Cost per Task, Time per Task, and Tokens per Task metrics. A sharp look at how to actually measure what matters when selecting models for production systems.
Tuesday, Jun 30, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Three AI infra companies are hosting a World Cup viewing lounge all day during AI Engineer World's Fair with food, drinks, and wifi for working between matches. Smart move if you want to network with builders while pretending to watch soccer.
Tuesday, Jun 30, 5:15 PM - 8:45 PM
GitHub's bringing together maintainers, founders, and infrastructure builders to debate where coding actually goes next. Two panel discussions on agentic AI and developer tools, plus demos and a happy hour to see what the Bay Area is shipping.
Tuesday, Jun 30, 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Models improved but production agent stacks haven't. This gathering brings together engineers across frameworks, deployment, and data layers to discuss what actually holds up in practice.
Tuesday, Jun 30, 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
For people who care about training runs and optimizer choices more than API calls. Three short talks monthly on what actually happens between arxiv papers and production systems, with time to dig into the weeds with other builders.
Wednesday, Jul 1, 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM
James Zou and Venkat Srinivasan explore how agents collaborating across open infrastructure are accelerating scientific discovery beyond what single models can achieve. A fireside chat on the research and model infrastructure powering the next generation of agentic systems, followed by food and proper networking.
Wednesday, Jul 1, 5:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Context graphs give AI agents the organizational reasoning behind a decision, the context they'd otherwise miss. A panel with Foundation Capital, Neo4j, and builders shipping this stack explores how capturing the "why" unlocks trustworthy autonomous systems.
Wednesday, Jul 1, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Agentic AI breaks cost models the moment it works in production, as multi-step reasoning and tool calls consume tokens faster than prices fall. This panel covers how teams actually control spend: reserved capacity, model routing, and optimization strategies that protect margin while scaling.
Thursday, Jul 2, 4:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Teams from Sanity, Temporal, OpenAI, and Entire.io are running trivia rounds designed around actual AI shipping problems, from diagnosing agent disasters to spotting hallucinations versus real songs. Cold beer, food, and serious prizes await at Standard Deviant Brewing if your team can catch a fake API endpoint.
Thursday, Jul 2, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Walk through the half-built space where Mission Robotics and The Residency are creating physical AI's Bay Area home. Mix with the founders and researchers actually putting minds in metal before the place gets polished.
Sunday, Jul 5, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM
A one-day build-athon in Oakland the day after the July 4th festival. Team up around a mission like AI, voting, or money in politics and build it into something real, no coding or expertise required.